VMworld is upon us, and so is View 5!

VMworld is upon us, and this week marks the official announcement of VMware’s View 5.0. VMware’s continuing to improve this successful platform, and View 5.0 introduces a number of enhancements that will improve control of user experience, including Client Side Caching, Lossless CODEC, and Build to Lossless GPO. The net effect is a significant improvement in scalability on WAN links, and increased user density on those links. You can learn more about View 5.0 and other important End User Computing announcements here.

View 5.0 also represents a significant step in enabling media-rich communications integrated with virtual desktops, through View Media Services for Unified Communications. This is an area where Cisco and VMware have continued their tradition of development collaboration, and solution integration, and we see this as an important step in the right direction. Coupled with Cisco VXI Virtualization Experience Clients we see this joint solution as delivering the industry’s best platform for an integrated media-rich, high-fidelity user experience.

I’ll go further to say that it doesn’t end there.. in the coming months you can expect to hear more from Cisco and VMware on the evolution of our VXC’s, and how we’re continuing to improve the end user experience inclusive of rich media and virtual desktops simultaneously. Cisco, VMware truly have a better-together story here, and enterprise communications is a natural extension of the collaborative proof-points we’ve jointly delivered inside the data center.

I also want to take the opportunity to highlight some exciting news from our friends at VCE. Yesterday they announced the Vblock FastPath Desktop Virtualization Platform. This new solution is purpose built for rapidly deploying View desktops by taking the guesswork and time out of selecting and provisioning a virtual desktop platform, while offering a single stop for support. This desktop virtualization “appliance” simplifies procurement, provides a modular and scalable way to manage growth, enables rapid provisioning in minutes, and is supported by a validated architecture to ensure predictable high-performance through peak demands, helping IT managers de-risk the infrastructure decisions for supporting virtual desktops, and having a simplified, single-number support model to deploy with confidence.

There’s a lot going on at the Cisco Booth (#700), so make sure you stop by if you happen to be at VMworld. We have a great VXI demo complete with VXC and Cius end points, and lot’s of content featuring the various Cisco technologies that make UCS the best platform for hosting View desktops. So, over the next couple days, we’ll turn to the data center and offer a couple of examples you might not have realized, as having a significant impact on providing the scalable, secure, high-performance virtual desktops to end users. Now, a server is a server right? Ultimately does it really matter whose bare-metal I choose to run desktop workloads on? You bet it does… And if you’re a server administrator, the stuff we’ll cover in the next couple posts this week should hit close to home. And if you’re a client services manager or desktop IT administrator, you’ll probably want to have a chat with your server team about some of this BEFORE you start planning your next pool of virtual desktops.

Well stated, Tony. Glad to see the awesome capabilities of UCS are making a mark in the market. I am also happy that the FastPath VDI solution is being followed shortly by the VCE Vblock based AlwaysOn Point Of Care healthcare solution for highly available, resilient, desktops for fast recovery from disasters.. in a matter of seconds rather than hours or days.
Imran Anwar

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